First off, some of the leading companies in the digital marketing industry have created tools themselves. These have undoubtedly had great success in building their respective brands. Some highlights (data pulled from OSE):

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/ – Open Site Explorer from Moz – 5600 Linking Root Domains and 3500 social shares
http://marketing.grader.com/ – Marketing Grader from HubSpot – 5100 LRDs and 5900 shares
http://www.socialsiteexplorer.com/ – Social Site Explorer from 97th Floor – 9 LRDs and 81 shares
http://www.seerinteractive.com/seo-toolbox/ – the SEO Toolbox from SEER Interactive – 90 LRDs and 334 shares
http://www.greenlaneseo.com/outdated-content-finder/ – Outdated Content Finder from Green Lane SEO – 52 LRDs and 82 shares
http://www.siegemedia.com/embed-code-generator – Embed Code Generator from Siege Media – 42 LRDs and 54 shares
http://www.quicksprout.com/ – Website Analyzer from QuickSprout (data is skewed because the tool now resides as the homepage) – 2300 LRDs and 3300 shares
http://mozcast.com/ – The Google Algorithm Weather Report – 729 LRDs and 6600 shares
http://www.portent.com/tools/title-maker/ – Content Idea Generator from Portent – 551 LRDs and 4100 shares

Those are some great numbers! Let’s see how other websites do it…

Examples of Tools on Other Websites:

• http://www.marketplace.org/topics/wealth-poverty/income-upshot – What does your income say about you?
• http://www.thistothat.com/ – Because people have a need to glue things to other things.
• http://www.staples.com/sbd/cre/marketing/technology-research-centers/ereaders/speed-reader/ – Speed read tool.
• http://www.forrent.com/blog/tv-size/ – What TV is best for my apartment?
• http://search-by-drawing.fullstackoptimization.com – Search Google by drawing.
• http://forecast.baremetrics.com/ – A SAAS revenue forecaster tool.
• http://www.disruptiveadvertising.com/customer-lifetime-value/ – A customer lifetime value calculator.
• http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-15391515 – Where do you fit in the world population?
• http://namify.com/target-social-media/ – How to find your demographic on social media.
• http://www.budgetdirect.com.au/packinglist/ – Ultimate travel packing list tool.
• http://mwranches.com/choose-adventure/ – Tool for finding outdoor adventures near you.
• http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ – Tool to check to see if a website is down.
• http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/buy-rent-calculator.html?_r=1 – Is it better to rent or buy?
• http://netflixroulette.net/ – Find Netflix movies to watch.
• http://growth.tlb.org/# – Startup growth calculator.
• http://rcs.seerinteractive.com/destination-layover/where-you-at – Find things to do on your layovers.
• http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/ – Visualizing language usage in NYT news coverage throughout its history.
• http://www.solarwinds.com/npm-roi-calculator.aspx – Network ROI calculator.
• http://ad-spend-calculator.qwilr.com/ – Should my startup pay to advertise?
• https://www.defensivedriving.com/road-trip-planner/ – Road trip planner.
• http://getdatadriven.com/ab-significance-test – Tool to see if your A/B tests are significant.
• http://www.twofoods.com/ – Instantly compare two foods’ nutritional value.
• http://salaryorequity.com/ – Salary or equity calculator.
• https://photofunia.com/effects/retro-wave – 80’s style picture maker.

Some of the tools above were made by my agency. Some are beautiful, some are not. Perhaps the most underwhelming example above is http://www.thistothat.com/. But that site has 660 linking root domains and 6,000 social shares! So the tools don’t need to be pretty or perfect to achieve success.

How can you create a tool for your business? 6 steps.

Now that you have (hopefully) been inspired by the awesome examples above, let’s go through the process of how you can create your own tool. Below are the steps that we use at our agency.

1. Define the goal for the tool. Do you want to drive revenue? Do you want to build your brand? Are you trying to build links? These answers should be clearly defined before you begin the content ideation process. Different types of tools are created for different reasons.
2. Comb through your existing content/resources. Depending on your previous content marketing initiatives, you may already have some piece of valuable content or resource that could be repurposed into a tool. DO NOT skip this step. You may save yourself a lot of time.
3. Look for successful content in your niche. Search over what your competitors have been producing. Look at niche subreddits on Reddit. Check out relevant Google Plus communities and LinkedIn groups. Find what is working well and decide if it’s something you can improve upon. You’d be surprised at what you might find.
4. Talk to your clients/customers. Don’t be afraid to ask your current clients or customers! Ask them if there are things they’ve been looking for recently that you could make.
5. Create the content. After doing your research and deciding on what you want to make, make it! If your tool involves a lot of programming, consider using resources like omniref.com or codepen.io patterns or github.com to save you time and money.
6. Promote the content. This is arguably the most important part of the entire process. There are many posts here on Moz that provide tips for outreach. But you should consider mapping out links and shares of similar content (using tools like BuzzSumo or Moz) and reaching out to all of those opportunities. This step CANNOT be overlooked.

Now that you have the steps, I hope you can get started on making a tool of your own! Please let me know if you have any questions along the way, just tweet me here. I’d love to chat with you! And if you know any tools that you think are awesome, please let me know! Good luck!